Well, About That Chinese Naval Preponderance...

China's looking to upend U.S. strategic submarine dominance, as I wrote about the other day, "China's Nuclear Subs Alter the Global Strategic Balance."

As as well as that's going for Beijing, you can't field a true blue-water navy without an aircraft carrier fleet. And on that front, thing's aren't going so well for the Chinese.

See War is Boring, "China’s Aircraft Carrier Trouble—Spewing Steam and Losing Power."

Honestly, I doubt China's going to be overtaking U.S. global preponderance any time soon. And I'm glad.

China's Nuclear Subs Alter the Global Strategic Balance

The question is when do we really start worrying about China's challenge to American strategic preeminence? Back in the late-1990s, lots of policy and scholarly work pumped up the China challenge, but it's only now that Beijing's truly giving the U.S. a run for its money. Recall, just a week or so ago folks were getting all fired up about China's GDP numbers surpassing America's, although some might have been over-stating the case (by using purchasing power parity).

Still, China is growing and competing against America for global military and economic leadership. The day of reckoning won't be anytime soon, and fortunes can change, but it pays to look at more micro-economic foundations of power, particularly in the military realm.

With that, here's the Wall Street Journal, "Deep Threat: China’s Submarines Add Nuclear-Strike Capability, Altering Strategic Balance":

One Sunday morning last December, China’s defense ministry summoned military attachés from several embassies to its monolithic Beijing headquarters.

To the foreigners’ surprise, the Chinese said that one of their nuclear-powered submarines would soon pass through the Strait of Malacca, a passage between Malaysia and Indonesia that carries much of world trade, say people briefed on the meeting.

Two days later, a Chinese attack sub—a so-called hunter-killer, designed to seek out and destroy enemy vessels—slipped through the strait above water and disappeared. It resurfaced near Sri Lanka and then in the Persian Gulf, say people familiar with its movements, before returning through the strait in February—the first known voyage of a Chinese sub to the Indian Ocean.

The message was clear: China had fulfilled its four-decade quest to join the elite club of countries with nuclear subs that can ply the high seas. The defense ministry summoned attachés again to disclose another Chinese deployment to the Indian Ocean in September—this time a diesel-powered sub, which stopped off in Sri Lanka.

China’s increasingly potent and active sub force represents the rising power’s most significant military challenge yet for the region. Its expanding undersea fleet not only bolsters China’s nuclear arsenal but also enhances the country’s capacity to enforce its territorial claims and thwart U.S. intervention.

China is expected to pass another milestone this year when it sets a different type of sub to sea—a “boomer,” carrying fully armed nuclear missiles for the first time—says the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, or ONI.

China is hardly hiding its new boomers. Tourists could clearly see three of them at a base opposite a resort recently in China’s Hainan province. On the beach, rented Jet Skis were accompanied by guides to make sure riders didn’t stray too close.

These boomers’ missiles have the range to hit Hawaii and Alaska from East Asia and the continental U.S. from the mid-Pacific, the ONI says.

“This is a trump card that makes our motherland proud and our adversaries terrified,” China’s navy chief, Adm. Wu Shengli, wrote of the country’s missile-sub fleet in a Communist Party magazine in December. “It is a strategic force symbolizing great-power status and supporting national security.”

Continue reading.

Chinese subs can't run silent, run deep, so we won't be seeing a replay of the "Hunt for Red October" anytime soon. The U.S. is far ahead on silent, underwater sonography technology.

China Touts Power in East Asia

Chinese GDP per capita is still a tiny fraction of America's, but hey, perhaps they've got the mojo.

At the Wall Street Journal, "China Military Official Blasts U.S. 'Hegemony' at Shangri-La Conference: Hagel Accuses Beijing of 'Destabilizing, Unilateral Actions'."

'Collective Amnesia' in China 25 Years After Tiananmen Square Massacre

A great piece, at the Los Angeles Times, "Collective amnesia prevails in China 25 years after Tiananmen Square."

The Chinese Communist Party maintains a brutal regime, but economic development and the loosening of social restraints have "bought off" mass unrest.

Plus, a video at Telegraph UK, "Tiananmen Square massacre: Communist Party still dares not publish the truth."

Parents Read Vet Son's Suicide Note On Air: CNN Anchor Breaks Down

It's Brooke Baldwin breaking down after parents Howard and Jean Somers read their son Daniel's note.

Background at WaPo, "Daniel Somers’s suicide, his family has a new mission: Improve VA services."

Via Conservative Hideout.



Also, ICYMI, "Why the Troops Diss Obama."

Why the Troops Diss Obama

Recall from yesterday, "Watch How Vastly Different West Point Cadets React Between Hearing Presidents Obama and Bush."

In a Washington Post and Kaiser Family Foundation poll out last month, just 32 percent of Afghanistan and Iraq veterans approved of how well President Obama "is handling his job as president." Just 42 percent consider Obama "a good commander-in-chief of the military." In contrast, when asked if George W. Bush "was he a good commander-in-chief of the military," two-thirds of respondents (65 percent) agreed that he was.

See, "After the Wars - Post-Kaiser survey of Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans."

And FWIW, see the discussion from Rajiv Chandrasekaran, "After the Wars: A Legacy of Pain and Pride." It's a beefy discussion, but one thing that sticks out is the mediocre medical care veterans say they receive from the Veterans Administration, which rings with particular resonance considering the Obama administration's VA scandal.

As for the huge gap between troop respect for President Bush versus President Obama, see former Army Lieutenant Colonel Alan West, "Blame Bush: Why Obama gets so little respect from the troops":

What civilians fail to realize is that we join the military to serve, realizing that the rigors of combat and privation are a part of that service, sacrifice, and commitment. We're not looking for someone “posing” as a leader who uses us as political pawns and gives away the hard-earned gains we've achieved. What troops want are leaders who are principled and will stand and have heartfelt sorrow when one of our brothers or sisters gives that last full measure of devotion.

What we see happening to our military under the Obama administration is unconscionable. The cutting of benefits to those serving, have served, and their families is disturbing. To have a Secretary of Defense step forward and announce we are cutting our military capability and capacity at a time when the world is far more volatile is perplexing.

To hear President Obama come out and say that we are war weary? When in the heck has he put on combat gear and humped on a patrol or spent years deployed?

Real combat troops don’t look for a fight, but when a fight comes their way, they want to win. And they expect leadership that will stand with them seeking victory, not retreat, masked as some insidious political campaign promise...

More.

I think the troops also genuinely respect a president who articulates and embodies American exceptionalism, like President Bush. (And President Obama, not so much.)

Obama's Foreign Policy: A Somber Parade of Straw Men and Emptiness

From Charles Krauthammer, at WaPo, "Emptiness at West Point":

As with the West Point speech itself, as with the president’s entire foreign policy of retreat, one can only marvel at the smallness of it all.

Watch How Vastly Different West Point Cadets React Between Hearing Presidents Obama and Bush

Oh my goodness this is brutal, at the Independent Journal Review.

Previous "icy" Obama at West Point blogging is here.

#Democrat Bob Beckel Attacks Kimberly Guilfoyle, Slurring Her as "Treasonous'

At Expose Liberals, "Blob Beckel meltdowns yet again – calls Kimberly Guilfoyle treasonous."

Obama, Biden Pushing a 'New World Order'

At Breitbart, "Obama, Biden Promoting a 'New,' 'Changing Very Rapidly' World Order."

Obama Skipped a Few World Events in His Big Foreign Policy Speech at West Point

I missed this editorial Richard Engle mentioned in his comments I posted earlier.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Obama at West Point":

The speech President Obama delivered Wednesday at West Point was intended to be a robust defense of his foreign policy, about which even our liberal friends are starting to entertain doubts. But as we listened to the President chart his course between the false-choice alternatives of "American isolationism" and "invading every country that harbors terrorist networks," we got to thinking of everything that wasn't in his speech.

No mention of the Reset. "The reset button has worked," Mr. Obama avowed in a 2009 meeting with Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's figurehead president. That was the same year Mr. Obama announced in Moscow that, "The days when empires could treat sovereign states as pieces on a chessboard are over."

No mention of the Pivot or "rebalance" to Asia. This was billed by Hillary Clinton in 2011 as "among the most important diplomatic efforts of our time" and meant as proof that America's withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan wasn't simply a retreat from the world. But as assistant secretary of defense Katrina McFarland admitted in March, following the latest round of Pentagon cuts, "Right now, the pivot is being looked at again, because candidly it can't happen."

No mention of Mr. Obama's Red Line in Syria against the use of chemical weapons. No mention, either, of the ostensible success of using diplomacy to disarm Bashar Assad. The President was fond of boasting of this achievement until recently, when it emerged that Assad continues to use chlorine bombs to kill his enemies. Somehow that also didn't make it into the speech....

We know that no foreign policy speech can cover the entire world. But listening to Mr. Obama trying to assemble a coherent foreign policy agenda from the record of the past five years was like watching Tom Hanks trying to survive in "Cast Away": Whatever's left from the wreckage will have to do.

U.S. International Relations Have Not Improved Under Obama

What's amazing is that it's leftist NBC correspondent Richard Engel making the case.

At Free Beacon, "NBC Reporter: U.S. Relations Have Not Improved With a Single Nation Under Obama."



Also at NewsBusters, "NBC's Richard Engel: U.S. Relations Have Not Improved With a Single Nation During Obama Presidency." (At Memeorandum.)

Bill Kristol vs. Peter Beinart on Obama's Troop Drawdown

Ooohh, you gotta love it!

Transcript here.

The Gift of American Power

From Robert Kaplan, at RealClearWorld.

And see Robert Kagan, at the New Republic, "Superpowers Don't Get to Retire."

Obama Consciously Engineering America's Decline

An essay at Commmentary (via Blazing Cat Fur).

And check out Megyn Kelly's interview last night with Rep. Buck McKeon, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee:


Background at NYT, "Pentagon Plans to Shrink Army to Pre-World War II Level."

The Jacksonian Tradition in U.S. Foreign Policy

Andrew Bacevich has an op-ed today at the Los Angeles Times, "The misuse of American might, and the price it pays."

Folks can read it at that link. I don't much care for Bacevich, who is the author of The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, an extremely austere version of political realism that's popular on the antiwar communist left.

What interests me here is Dave Schuler's post at Outside the Beltway that links Bacevich but elaborates with Walter Russell Mead's theory of Jacksonian foreign policy (at Memeorandum). Schuler links to Mead's article at the National Interest (Winter 1999/2000), "The Jacksonian Tradition and American Foreign Policy." That's a PDF document, but here's the web version at the archives.

It's good reading:

In the last five months of World War II, American bombing raids claimed the lives of more than 900,000 Japanese civilians—not counting the casualties from the atomic strikes against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is more than twice the total number of combat deaths that the United States has suffered in all its foreign wars combined.

On one night, that of March 9-10, 1945, 234 Superfortresses dropped 1,167 tons of incendiary bombs over downtown Tokyo; 83,793 Japanese bodies were found in the charred remains—a number greater than the 80,942 combat fatalities that the United States sustained in the Korean and Vietnam Wars combined.

Since the Second World War, the United States has continued to employ devastating force against both civilian and military targets. Out of a pre-war population of 9.49 million, an estimated 1 million North Korean civilians are believed to have died as a result of U.S. actions during the 1950-53 conflict. During the same war, 33,870 American soldiers died in combat, meaning that U.S. forces killed approximately thirty North Korean civilians for every American soldier who died in action. The United States dropped almost three times as much explosive tonnage in the Vietnam War as was used in the Second World War, and something on the order of 365,000 Vietnamese civilians are believed to have been killed during the period of American involvement.

Regardless of Clausewitz’s admonition that "casualty reports . . . are never accurate, seldom truthful, and in most cases deliberately falsified", these numbers are too striking to ignore. They do not, of course, suggest a moral parallel between the behavior of, say, German and Japanese aggressors and American forces seeking to defeat those aggressors in the shortest possible time. German and Japanese forces used the indiscriminate murder of civilians as a routine police tool in occupied territory, and wholesale massacres of civilians often accompanied German and Japanese advances into new territory. The behavior of the German Einsatzgruppen and of the Japanese army during the Rape of Nanking has no significant parallel on the American side.

In the Cold War, too, the evils the Americans fought were far worse than those they inflicted. Tens of millions more innocent civilians in communist nations were murdered by their own governments in peacetime than ever died as the result of American attempts to halt communism’s spread. War, even brutal war, was more merciful than communist rule.

Nevertheless, the American war record should make us think. An observer who thinks of American foreign policy only in terms of the commercial realism of the Hamiltonians, the crusading moralism of Wilsonian transcendentalists, and the supple pacifism of the principled but slippery Jeffersonians would be at a loss to account for American ruthlessness at war.

Those who prefer to believe that the present global hegemony of the United States emerged through a process of immaculate conception avert their eyes from many distressing moments in the American ascension. Yet students of American power cannot ignore one of the chief elements in American success. The United States over its history has consistently summoned the will and the means to compel its enemies to yield to its demands.

Through the long sweep of American history, there have been many occasions when public opinion, or at least an important part of it, got ahead of politicians in demanding war. Many of the Indian wars were caused less by Indian aggression than by movements of frontier populations willing to provoke and fight wars with Indian tribes that were nominally under Washington’s protection—and contrary both to the policy and the wishes of the national government. The War of 1812 came about largely because of a popular movement in the South and Midwest. Abraham Lincoln barely succeeded in preventing a war with Britain over the Trent Affair during the Civil War; public opinion made it difficult for him to find an acceptable, face-saving solution to the problem. More recently, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were all haunted by fears that a pullout from the Vietnam War would trigger a popular backlash.

Once wars begin, a significant element of American public opinion supports waging them at the highest possible level of intensity. The devastating tactics of the wars against the Indians, General Sherman’s campaign of 1864-65, and the unprecedented aerial bombardments of World War II were all broadly popular in the United States. During both the Korean and Vietnam Wars, presidents came under intense pressure, not only from military leaders but also from public opinion, to hit the enemy with all available force in all available places. Throughout the Cold War the path of least resistance in American politics was generally the more hawkish stance. Politicians who advocated negotiated compromises with the Soviet enemy were labeled appeasers and paid a heavy political price. The Korean and Vietnam Wars lost public support in part because of political decisions not to risk the consequences of all-out war, not necessarily stopping short of the use of nuclear weapons. The most costly decision George Bush took in the Gulf War was not to send ground forces into Iraq, but to stop short of the occupation of Baghdad and the capture and trial of Saddam Hussein.

It is often remarked that the American people are more religious than their allies in Western Europe. But it is equally true that they are more military-minded....

*****

It is a tribute to the general historical amnesia about American politics between the War of 1812 and the Civil War that Andrew Jackson is not more widely counted among the greatest of American presidents. Victor in the Battle of New Orleans—perhaps the most decisive battle in the shaping of the modern world between Trafalgar and Stalingrad—Andrew Jackson laid the foundation of American politics for most of the nineteenth century, and his influence is still felt today. With the ever ready help of the brilliant Martin Van Buren, he took American politics from the era of silk stockings into the smoke-filled room. Every political party since his presidency has drawn on the symbolism, the institutions and the instruments of power that Jackson pioneered.

More than that, he brought the American people into the political arena. Restricted state franchises with high property qualifications meant that in 1820 many American states had higher property qualifications for voters than did boroughs for the British House of Commons. With Jackson’s presidency, universal male suffrage became the basis of American politics and political values.

His political movement—or, more accurately, the community of political feeling that he wielded into an instrument of power—remains in many ways the most important in American politics. Solidly Democratic through the Truman administration (a tradition commemorated in the annual Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners that are still the high points on Democratic Party calendars in many cities and states), Jacksonian America shifted toward the Republican Party under Richard Nixon—the most important political change in American life since the Second World War. The future of Jacksonian political allegiance will be one of the keys to the politics of the twenty-first century.

Suspicious of untrammeled federal power (Waco), skeptical about the prospects for domestic and foreign do-gooding (welfare at home, foreign aid abroad), opposed to federal taxes but obstinately fond of federal programs seen as primarily helping the middle class (Social Security and Medicare, mortgage interest subsidies), Jacksonians constitute a large political interest.

In some ways Jacksonians resemble the Jeffersonians, with whom their political fortunes were linked for so many decades. Like Jeffersonians, Jacksonians are profoundly suspicious of elites. They generally prefer a loose federal structure with as much power as possible retained by states and local governments. But the differences between the two movements run very deep—so deep that during the Cold War they were on dead opposite sides of most important foreign policy questions. To use the language of the Vietnam era, a time when Jeffersonians and Jacksonians were fighting in the streets over foreign policy, the former were the most dovish current in mainstream political thought during the Cold War, while the latter were the most consistently hawkish.

One way to grasp the difference between the two schools is to see that both Jeffersonians and Jacksonians are civil libertarians, passionately attached to the Constitution and especially to the Bill of Rights, and deeply concerned to preserve the liberties of ordinary Americans. But while the Jeffersonians are most profoundly devoted to the First Amendment, protecting the freedom of speech and prohibiting a federal establishment of religion, Jacksonians see the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms, as the citadel of liberty. Jeffersonians join the American Civil Liberties Union; Jacksonians join the National Rifle Association. In so doing, both are convinced that they are standing at the barricades of freedom...

Continue reading.

PHOTO CREDIT: Wikimedia Commons.

Today's Parallels with World War One's International Politics

An interesting commentary, at the Economist, "The first world war:Look back with angst":

Humanity can learn from its mistakes, as shown by the response to the economic crisis, which was shaped by a determination to avoid the mistakes that led to the Depression. The memory of the horrors unleashed a century ago makes leaders less likely to stumble into war today. So does the explosive power of a modern conflagration: the threat of a nuclear holocaust is a powerful brake on the reckless escalation that dispatched a generation of young men into the trenches.

Yet the parallels remain troubling. The United States is Britain, the superpower on the wane, unable to guarantee global security. Its main trading partner, China, plays the part of Germany, a new economic power bristling with nationalist indignation and building up its armed forces rapidly. Modern Japan is France, an ally of the retreating hegemon and a declining regional power. The parallels are not exact—China lacks the Kaiser’s territorial ambitions and America’s defence budget is far more impressive than imperial Britain’s—but they are close enough for the world to be on its guard.

Which, by and large, it is not. The most troubling similarity between 1914 and now is complacency. Businesspeople today are like businesspeople then: too busy making money to notice the serpents flickering at the bottom of their trading screens. Politicians are playing with nationalism just as they did 100 years ago. China’s leaders whip up Japanophobia, using it as cover for economic reforms, while Shinzo Abe stirs Japanese nationalism for similar reasons. India may next year elect Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist who refuses to atone for a pogrom against Muslims in the state he runs and who would have his finger on the button of a potential nuclear conflict with his Muslim neighbours in Pakistan. Vladimir Putin has been content to watch Syria rip itself apart. And the European Union, which came together in reaction to the bloodshed of the 20th century, is looking more fractious and riven by incipient nationalism than at any point since its formation.

Continue reading.

I think the U.S. is a far more dominant country than most people admit, and thus this idea of China playing the role of Germany (and it's bid for European dominance in the early 20th century) is a stretch to me. And the key technology today is nuclear weapons, which will prevent a great power war even if China catches up to the U.S. (which will be decades if not centuries from now).

An interesting piece, in any case.

Google Hegemony

At the New York Times, "Google's Road Map to Global Domination":

Fifty-five miles and three days down the Colorado River from the put-in at Lee’s Ferry, near the Utah-Arizona border, the two rafts in our little flotilla suddenly encountered a storm. It sneaked up from behind, preceded by only a cool breeze. With the canyon walls squeezing the sky to a ribbon of blue, we didn’t see the thunderhead until it was nearly on top of us.

I was seated in the front of the lead raft. Pole position meant taking a dunk through the rapids, but it also put me next to Luc Vincent, the expedition’s leader. Vincent is the man responsible for all the imagery in Google’s online maps. He’s in charge of everything from choosing satellite pictures to deploying Google’s planes around the world to sending its camera-equipped cars down every road to even this, a float through the Grand Canyon. The raft trip was a mapping expedition that was also serving as a celebration: Google Maps had just introduced a major redesign, and the outing was a way of rewarding some of the team’s members.

Vincent wore a black T-shirt with the eagle-globe-and-anchor insignia of the United States Marine Corps on his chest and the slogan “Pain is weakness leaving the body” across his back. Though short in stature, he has the upper-body strength of an avid rock climber. He chose to get his Ph.D. in computer vision, he told me, because the lab happened to be close to Fontainebleau — the famous climbing spot in France. While completing his postdoc at the Harvard Robotics Lab, he led a successful expedition up Denali, the highest peak in North America.

A Frenchman who has lived half his 49 years in the United States, Vincent was never in the Marines. But he is a leader in a new great game: the Internet land grab, which can be reduced to three key battles over three key conceptual territories. What came first, conquered by Google’s superior search algorithms. Who was next, and Facebook was the victor. But where, arguably the biggest prize of all, has yet to be completely won.

Where-type questions — the kind that result in a little map popping up on the search-results page — account for some 20 percent of all Google queries done from the desktop. But ultimately more important by far is location-awareness, the sort of geographical information that our phones and other mobile devices already require in order to function. In the future, such location-awareness will be built into more than just phones. All of our stuff will know where it is — and that awareness will imbue the real world with some of the power of the virtual. Your house keys will tell you that they’re still on your desk at work. Your tools will remind you that they were lent to a friend. And your car will be able to drive itself on an errand to retrieve both your keys and your tools.

While no one can say exactly how we will get from the current moment to that Jetsonian future, one thing for sure can be said about location-awareness: maps are required. Tomorrow’s map, integrally connected to everything that moves (the keys, the tools, the car), will be so fundamental to their operation that the map will, in effect, be their operating system. A map is to location-awareness as Windows is to a P.C. And as the history of Microsoft makes clear, a company that controls the operating system controls just about everything. So the competition to make the best maps, the thinking goes, is more than a struggle over who dominates the trillion-dollar smartphone market; it’s a contest over the future itself.

Fascinating.

RTWT, at the link.

And ICYMI, the interview with Google's Sebastien Thrun, "'I think anybody who believes that we are in a period of decline or stagnation probably hasn’t been paying attention...'"

National Reconnaissance Office Launches New 'Release the Kraken' Spy Satellite

"Nothing is beyond our reach."

From Kash Hill, at Forbes, "U.S. Spy Rocket Has Octopus-Themed 'Nothing Is Beyond Our Reach' Logo. Seriously" (via Instapundit).

Ready for launch? An Atlas 5 will blast off at just past 11PM, PST carrying an classified NRO payload (also cubesats) pic.twitter.com/ll7s0nCOPg

— Office of the DNI (@ODNIgov) December 5, 2013

'I think anybody who believes that we are in a period of decline or stagnation probably hasn’t been paying attention...'

That's Sebastian Thrun, Google's top research scientist, at Foreign Affairs, "Google's Original X-Man: A Conversation With Sebastian Thrun."

A phenomenal interview:

There are people who feel that the prospects of life are diminishing and that the next generation is not going to have a better life than the previous one. Do you think your child’s life will be more interesting and exciting and filled with larger prospects than yours?

If you look at history, the fear that the next generation would be worse off than the previous one has been around for many centuries. It’s not a new fear. And it’s often due to the lack of imagination of people in understanding how innovation is moving forward. But if you graph progress and quality of life over time, and you zoom out a little and look at the centuries, it’s gotten better and better and better and better.

Our ability to be at peace with each other has grown. Our ability to have cultural interchanges has improved. We have more global languages, we have faster travel, we have better communication, we have better health. I think these trends will be sustained going forward, absolutely no question. If you look at the type of things that are happening right now in leading research labs, I see so many great new technologies coming out in the next ten to 20 years. It ought to be great.

So you disagree with the notion that innovation is dead, or that we’re in a great stagnation, or a period of decline?

I think anybody who believes that we are in a period of decline or stagnation probably hasn’t been paying attention. If you look at the way society has transformed itself in the last 20 years, it’s more fundamental than the 50 years before and maybe even bigger than the 200 years before.

I’ll give an example. With the advent of digital information, the recording, storage, and dissemination of information has become practically free. The previous time there was such a significant change in the cost structure for the dissemination of information was when the book became popular. Printing was invented in the fifteenth century, became popular a few centuries later, and had a huge impact in that we were able to move cultural knowledge from the human brain into a printed form. We have the same sort of revolution happening right now, on steroids, and it is affecting every dimension of human life.

A century or two ago, you had innovations such as steam, electricity, railroads, the internal combustion engine, the telegraph and telephone and radio. Those things had ramifications that fundamentally changed the structure of society, the structure of political organization. Is the information technology revolution going to have that kind of impact?
I think the impact will be greater. I don't want to belittle any innovation. I think the steam engine, the car, television, all the examples you mentioned are landmarks of history. But if you zoom out a little bit, most of these inventions come from the last 150 to 200 years. Very few are a thousand years old or older, and given that humanity is much older than that, you could say that almost all inventions are recent. I believe the full potential of the Internet has not been realized yet, and we're not very used to it. But a hundred years from now, we will conclude this was one of the biggest revolutions ever.

I believe we live in an age where most interesting inventions have not been made, where there are enormous opportunities to move society forward. I'm excited to live right now. But I would rather live 20 years from now or 50 years from now than live today. It's going to be better and better.